HIGHLIGHTS
AstroNet II arrives to its end [+]
Roberto Emparan receives an ERC
Advanced Grant [+]
The most energetic light ever observed from a pulsar [+]
Are Earth-like planets our best bet
for finding extra-terrestrial life? [+]
Extremely diffuse light detected
around quasars in the distant Universe [+]
Night Sky in Barcelona, up to six
times more brilliant if there are
clouds [+]
ICCUB researchers, top cited in two
researcher rankings [+]

O U T R E AC H
160 students from 150 high schools
participate in the 11th Edition of the
Masterclass on Particle Physics [+]
The ICCUB participates at Espai
Ciència of Saló de l’Ensenyament [+]

HIGHLIGHTS
AstroNet II arrives to its end

COHERENT
LAGRANGIAN
STRUCTURES

AstroNet II, a Marie-Curie Research Training Network on Astrodynamics coordinated by ICCUB member Gerard Gómez,
arrived to its end in December 2015.
Since 2012, AstroNet II has brought
together mathematicians, engineers and
astronomers from different universities,
governmental space agencies and aerospace
industries, to work on astrodynamic problems related to trajectory design and attitude control, structural flexibility of spacecraft
and formation flying. A proposal for a new
network, Astron3t, has been submitted.

The Coherent Lagrangian
Structure formalism
Barcelona, Facultat de Física
(LCS) can be use to study
the dynamics of the three
body problem.

Roberto Emparan receives an ERC
Advanced Grant

Are Earth-like planets our best bet for
finding extra-terrestrial life?

Night Sky in Barcelona, up to six times
more brilliant if there are clouds

Rorberto Emparan, ICREA researcher at
ICCUB, has been awarded an Advanced
Grant by the European Research Council
(ERC) for his project A New Strategy for
Gravity and Black Holes. The call received
close to 2000 applications. The success rate
in this call has not been announced yet,
but in the previous call it was only 8.5%.
The funding is up to 2.5 million Euros per
grant and lasts up to five years.
General Relativity encompasses a huge
variety of physical phenomena and provides the basis to our understanding of the
Universe and its evolution at the largest
scales. Black holes play a central role in
this theory. However, their equations are
exceedingly hard to solve. The awarded
project led by R. Emparan is aimed at
developing a novel approach to solve black
hole physics by using the number of dimensions D as a perturbation parameter.

Our planet, the Earth, is not a fair representation of other life-bearing planets, while
mankind is not a fair reflection of intelligent
species, concludes a study published in
the MNRAS by ICCUB researcher Fergus
Simpson.
Using a statistical calculation, Simpson
estimates that most sentient extra-terrestrial species exceed 300 kg, similar to the
mass of an adult polar bear. This result is
based solely on the premise that, on average, physically larger organisms possess
smaller populations. Following a similar
line of reasoning, Simpson also finds that
the majority of planets which host life are
smaller than the Earth. [MNRAS Letters,
456 (2016) L59. This work has also been
featured in an animation by MinutePhysics:
https://youtu.be/KRGca_Ya6OM]

In his PhD thesis Characterization of light
pollution in protected and urban areas,
which has been supervised by ICCUB
member Jordi Torra, ICCUB collaborator
Salvador Ribas quantifies how the presence
of clouds affects to the luminosity of the
night sky in both protected and urban
areas.
The study, made in Barcelona and in the
protected area of Montsec, shows that in
urban areas clouds can rise the sky luminosity up to six times, whereas in protected
areas they can even decrease it.

The most energetic light ever observed
from a pulsar
Scientists from the MAGIC collaboration
including ICCUB researchers Roberta
Zanin and Daniel Galindo have reported
the discovery of the most energetic pulsating radiation ever detected from a stellar
object: the Crab pulsar, a tiny neutron star.
The new observations detected photons
with energies a thousand times larger than
the previously observed. This discovery
questions our knowledge about this kind
of stars and opens new challenges for
acceleration of particles in extreme media.
[A&A, 585 (2016) A133]

Extremely diffuse light detected
around quasars in the distant Universe
A team from the SDSS-III Collaboration,
including the ICREA researcher at ICCUB
Jordi Miralda, has tentatively discovered
the presence of an extremely diffuse light
around distant quasars.
The discovery was made by measuring
the cross-correlation of Lyman-α surface
brightness with quasars in the Baryon
Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS),
which allowed to detect the large-scale
structure of Lyman-α emission in the Universe at redshifts z = 2–3.5. It was shown
that there is a systematic excess of Lyman
alpha light being emitted near the quasars.
[MNRAS, 457 (2016) 3541]

ICCUB researchers, top cited in two
researcher rankings
Licia Verde, ICREA researcher at the
ICCUB, is among the top-cited researchers
in the world, according to the Highly Cited
Researchers report from Thomson Reuters.
About three thousand researchers earned this distinction by writing the greatest
number of papers ranking among the top
1% most cited for their subject field and
year of publication. For the analysis, only
Highly Cited Papers in journals indexed
in the Web of Science Core Collection
during the 11-year period 2003-2013 were
surveyed, in order to recognize early and
mid-career as well as senior researchers.
At the same time, 9 ICCUB researchers
are among the top 1% most cited scientists
in Spanish Institutions, according to the
first edition of Webometrics report, based
on the Google Scholar Citations public
profiles of 10,000 scientists working in
Spain.

SOLAR PHYSICS
SOL2UP and HESPERIA, two projects
to study the solar particle radiation
environment
The heliosphere is a uniquely accessible
domain of space, where fundamental
physical processes common to solar,
astrophysical, and laboratory plasmas can
be studied under conditions impossible
to reproduce on Earth, or to study from
astronomical distances. Solar Energetic
Particles (SEPs) are accelerated by solar
eruptive phenomena such as flares and collisionless shock waves driven by coronal
mass ejections, the largest of them being
capable of affecting the entire heliospheric environment. SEP events may affect
the vulnerability of orbiting satellites and
ground based systems and cause damage
to electronics on board spacecraft. In order
to further understand the physics of SEP

events, the European Space Agency will
launch the Solar Orbiter mission in October
2018. In preparation for that, the Heliospheric Physics and Space Weather group of the
ICCUB, lead by Blai Sanahuja, is developing
models to predict the harsh radiation environment that Solar Orbiter will encounter,
and tools to facilitate the analysis of the
particle measurements that it will gather.
When planning space missions, agencies
use SEP environment models to estimate
the level of radiation that interplanetary
spacecraft may suffer. One of these models,
the Solar Energetic Particle Environment
Model (SEPEM), is currently under development. The ICCUB team was recently
awarded an ESA-sponsored project, SOL2UP, to update the physics-based module
of the SEPEM model. The SOLPENCO2
(SOLar Particle ENgineering COde 2) tool
provides the heliocentric radial distance

scaling (from 0.2 AU to 1.6 AU) of the
maximum intensity and fluence during
SEP events for 5-200 MeV protons.
The group is also currently involved
in HESPERIA, a project funded by the
European Union under the H2020 programme. The ICCUB group is leading the
development of the first inversion method
to infer the sources of relativistic SEPs
(> 500 MeV) based on the observations
provided by the worldwide network of
ground-based neutron monitors. Relativistic SEPs provide a vital observational
basis for understanding the most energetic
acceleration processes occurring during
solar eruptive events. Moreover, because
of their large speed, these particles provide
a clear picture of the particle release time
history at the Sun and the properties of
their transport along the interplanetary
magnetic field.

CARTOON DEPICTING THE MAIN SOURCES OF SOLAR ENERGETIC PARTICLES IN THE HELIOSPHERE.
Simultaneous observations of magnetic field lines connecting back to flare sites (inset 1) and to shock fronts driven by interplanetary
coronal mass ejections (inset 2) are required to determine the relative importance of the associated acceleration processes [credit:
Adapted from NASAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Solar Sentinels STDT report].

I CC U B CO L LO Q U I A

U P CO M I N G
SCIENTIFIC AC TIVITIES

New Edition of the ICCUB Colloquia
The 2016 Edition of the ICCUB Colloquia
has started with talks by N. Shaviv (Racah
Inst. of Physics), expert on astrophysics
and climate science, and F. Quevedo (U.
Cambridge), expert on superstring phenomenology .
The Edition will continue with more
talks given by world renowned speakers
about cutting-edge topics in cosmology,
astrophysics and particle physics. The
confirmed speakers at the moment are:
Andrew C. Fabian (Inst. of Astronomy, U.
Cambridge), K. Langanke (Technische U.
Darmstadt) and L. Verde (ICCUB).

Barcelona TechnoWeek, a new school
by ICCUB initiative
The Barcelona TechnoWeeks will be a series
of meeting point events between academia
and industry about different technological
topics. In its first edition, held from July 11th
to 15th at the Physics School of the UB, the
school will offer the Course on Semiconduc-

tor Detectors, which will include lectures
about solid state radiation detection, from
physics and electronics fundamentals to
state-of-the-art reviews on radiation, and
visible light detection technologies and their
applications.
This school has been created by ICCUB
as part of its program as Centro de Excelencia María de Maeztu.

OUTREACH
160 students from 150 high schools
participate in the 11th Edition of the
Masterclass on Particle Physics
The Masterclass, organized at an international level by IPPOG and known in Catalonia
as Taller de Física de Partícules, has been
organized by the Experimental Particle
Physics Group of the ICCUB since 2005.
The 2016 edition was held on February
26th and March 11th. During one day, the
participants, which had been selected by
their teachers for their special interest in
Physics, attended to several talks about
particle physics and studied real data from
the LHC. A special session for high school
teachers was also held on the 29th February.

The ICCUB participates at Espai Ciència of Saló de l’Ensenyament
The 2016 edition of Espai Ciència took
place at Fira de Barcelona from March
9th to 13th. The ICCUB participated in the
UB and CERCA stands and offered two
outreach activities: the Mini-Masterclass
on Particle Physics and the Workshop on
Cosmic Distances.